'I've met him, too,' Hatfield said. 'He didn't seem that scary.'

'He's Hunger,' Edward said.

'I don't get it,' Hatfield said.

'The vampires said Bernardo looks good enough to eat, but no one's ever tasted him, so he leaves them hungry.'

She frowned.

Jonas seemed to think about it, and then he grinned wide and happy. He laughed. 'He's tasty like food, I get it.'

'Dangerous food,' Edward said. 'He has the fifth highest kill count of any marshal.'

'I've met Jeffries once. He had a way of looking at women when he thought no one else was looking, like we were meat, and that was before he caught lycanthropy on the job. Now I guess we really are meat to him.' She shivered, shoulders hunching a little, and then seemed to realize what she'd done and stood up straight, shoulders back.

The fact that she'd noticed made me think better of Hatfield. I knew Otto Jeffries as Olaf. Olaf's hobby was being a serial killer, never in this country, and never on government work, so if you could keep him working he was 'safe.' The military kept him busy, and since he got a badge he was even busier, and being a part of the Preternatural Branch of the Marshals Service meant he could torture and kill vampires and rogue shapeshifters to his heart's content, and as long as he killed them in the end, there were no rules to how he carried out the execution or how long he took to do it. Olaf was one of the scariest people I'd ever met, alive or undead, and that was an impressive list to be near the top of. Hatfield was right; he'd been that scary before he got cut up by a werelion and tested positive for lycanthropy. He'd gone AWOL after he got his test results, but he'd resurfaced a few months later. If he'd done anything unfortunate while he was learning to control his beast, the human authorities hadn't heard about it.

Micah had asked around in the preternatural community, and Olaf seemed to be playing the part of a nomad lion. He had stayed away from any group. Where he'd gone to learn to control himself, no one seemed to know. I actually wondered if he hadn't gone anywhere, if the serial killer part of him was actually so close to an inner beast that he'd understood how to control both?

Since Olaf had considered me his little serial killer girlfriend because we went out and killed people together, I'd avoided him before he learned to turn furry; now he was avoiding me as hard as I avoided him. He'd known Nicky before he became my Bride, and Olaf was afraid of my taming him the same way. Anything that kept Olaf away from me was fine in my book.

'I haven't seen Otto since he caught lycanthropy either.'

'You're a fur-banger; why would him being a wereanimal bother you?' Hatfield asked.

I turned and looked at her. 'What did you call me?'

'So you don't deny that you slept with Jeffries, too.'

'I didn't sleep with him, but I've learned two things. One, it's impossible to prove a negative, to prove I didn't do something. Two, when a woman sleeps with more than one man, she gets accused of sleeping with damn near everybody. But let's get back to you calling me a fur-banger.'

'I'm not familiar with the term,' Jonas said, 'so before I yell at someone for saying it, tell me what it means.'

'It means someone who fucks shapeshifters,' Hatfield said.

'No, it doesn't,' I said. 'It means people who will fuck any shapeshifter just because they are one. It's like badge bunnies are about cops.'

'Hatfield, that sounds pretty insulting to a fellow marshal.'

'I heard you were living with Sheriff Callahan's son, Mike, and another wereleopard from his group; that true?'

'Yeah, it's true.'

'The two blonds you brought in with you tonight. They're shapeshifters just like Rickman said, right?'

'Yeah,' I said.

'You sleeping with them, too?'

I took a deep breath in and let it out slow. I counted slow, before saying, 'Yes.'

'So four shapeshifters,' she said.

'I never said I didn't date shapeshifters.'

'And Forrester here, too, right?'

I looked at Edward. 'Will it do any good to deny it?' I asked.

'If she wants to believe it, she's going to,' he said, but his voice was losing the Tedness and getting colder and more empty. The real Edward was beginning to seep through.

'And I hear your Master of the City flew to your side, so you're also screwing him.'

'You know, Hatfield, I was going to try to like you, but I don't think I want to work that hard; let's just hate each other and get it over with.'

'You're fur-banging coffin bait and helping Forrester cheat on his fiancee who has two kids; I was never going to like you, Blake.'

'Hatfield,' Jonas said, one word, sharp and unhappy with her.

'If I'm really doing Ted here, then why is Donna, that's his fiancee, okay with me being in the wedding? She's wanting one of my fur-bangees to be in the wedding, too. I know some of the other law enforcement people will be at the wedding; maybe when they see me standing at the altar with Donna and Ted, this stupid rumor will go away.'

Hatfield's mouth opened and then closed; unfortunately it opened again. 'If that's true, I'll apologize after the wedding.'

'Fine, what's the longest-term relationship you've ever had?'

'I don't see how that's any of your business,' she said.

'You call me names and get up in my face about my personal life. You spread rumors about me and Marshal Forrester, and you get insulted because I ask a simple question?'

She went back to looking sullen. There were lines around her mouth that showed she frowned a lot more than she smiled. Smile lines are happy exclamations; frown lines just makes you look old before your time. If Hatfield wasn't careful she was going to do the latter.

'Blake is being polite after everything you've said to her, Susan,' Jonas said.

She frowned harder but said, 'Three years. I was married for three years.'

'Okay. Micah Callahan, Nathaniel, and I have been living together for three years. I've been dating Jean-Claude, my Master of the City, for almost seven. The blonds, as you call them, have both been with me over a year.'

'It's not the same thing as being married,' she said.

'It's not my fault that it's illegal to marry multiple men at the same time; that's like saying that a gay couple isn't as serious as a straight couple because the straight couple is married, at the same time you make it impossible for the gay couple to marry.'

'Are you saying that you would marry all of them?' She made sure I didn't miss the disdain in her voice.

'Not all of them, but a lot of them, yeah.'

'A lot of them?' Again, she made sure the disdain dripped all over her words.

'We're still working out who's going to marry whom,' I said.